Press ESC or click the X to close this window

Susan’s Bookshelves: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

I recently saw a modern play version of Oscar Wilde’s only novel in which shifting images were on mobile phones. It reminded me of a version called Selfie, which the National Youth Theatre staged in 2016 and which covered similar ground.  It was also a wake-up call. What did Wilde actually write in his 1891 novel? Of course I’d read it but only, I think, once and that was probably 50 years ago. It was, therefore, a pretty overdue reread.

Gray is an exceptionally good-looking young man in his late teens when the novel opens. Born to a wealthy family, he lives in great comfort and there is no question of his ever having to earn a living. He receives his full inheritance when he comes of age at 21. He is befriended by Basil Hallward, an artist, who is bowled over by Gray’s beauty and paints a stunning portrait of him. Hallward also introduces him to Lord Henry Wotton, a louche, cynical but charismatically entertaining man.

Gradually Gray slides into a moral abyss, initially by courting and promising to marry a second rate young actress who then takes her own life when he dumps her. And, as the years pass, it goes on getting worse until he is notorious and harbouring dark secrets.  Meanwhile he seems, unaccountably to have found, the secret of eternal youth, in appearance at least. But the painting is changing and revealing the truth so, in terrified horror, he locks it in a room upstairs. Yes, at one level it’s pure gothic and very much of its time. I’ll spare you any spoilers about what eventually happens just in case you’re new to The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In many ways we’re in the same world as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which was published only five years earlier in 1886. The dual personality – the public face versus the private amoral evil – and the investigative presentation of conscience are very clearly present in both books. If I were still teaching A level English it would be an interesting project to study both texts comparatively with students.

The other thing which interested me a lot is the character of Lord Henry. Even his friends get weary of his aphorisms, some of which are often now casually attributed to Wilde by people who have probably forgotten, if they ever knew, that he put them into the mouth of Lord Henry. Of exhibitions at Royal Academy  he comments:  there have either been so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures, that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.”.  He castigates opera goers’ dresses as “designed in a rage and put on in a tempest” and criticises those who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing”.

Lord Henry is, arguably, the character who “corrupts” Gray, or at least sets him on the path to corruption. And that is probably the most interesting question in the novel. Can one person lead another astray to this extent? How much of our behaviour comes from our own moral compass or lack of it and how much is triggered by external influences? Wilde is said to have based the character partly on his friend, Lord Ronald Gower, and partly on what he knew was the public perception (rather than the reality) of his own personality.

Finally, of course, Wilde was famously gay or bisexual and ultimately treated shockingly by the law. The friendships between the men in this novel have clear homo-erotic overtones while women are always a sidelined inconvenience. There is, one suspects, a certain amount of “Bunburying” and it’s fascinating to note how clear that is now in way it wouldn’t have been to the average reader in 1891 although, the undercover gay community would have sensed it.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Murder Under the Mistletoe by Richard Coles  

Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra

Brighton Dome

Conductor: Geoffrey Paterson

Soloist: Evelyn Glennie

01 December 2024

 

Dame Evelyn Glennie CH, CBE is unique. No one else has (yet) made a sparklng, worldwide career as a very famous solo percussionist. She fills halls wherever she goes and the almost sold out Brighton Dome was no exception. It was a joy to see many young people and children in the audience.

Walking onto the stage in her stockinged feet (presumably so she can better absorb the vibrations which is how she “hears”) she captivated the audience from the first tam-tam crash in James Macmillan’s Veni Veni Emmanuel  (1992) – a wonderfully appropriate choice for the first Sunday in Advent although that point wasn’t laboured. Glennie’s instruments – various drums, marimba, vibraphone and more – were arranged at the front of the stage with the orchestra sitting well back. She walked calmly from one to the other with the extended solo on woodblocks and gongs being a particular high spot. The marimba quasi-cadenza underpinned by muted violin harmonics and cello pedal notes was special too.

For those who wish to share it at that level this is a deeply religious work for Advent working though various moods and statements to the extraordinary Easter coda  – Macmillan loves the drama of his faith. Thus, at the end, orchestral players hold small pieces of tinkling metal which they play to create an Easter vigil. In this performance Paterson ensured it was arrestingly powerful as Glennie moved solemnly to the tubular bells at the back of the orchestra, the audience audibly spellbound. The echo of the bells lasted for several minutes, while Paterson stood arms out (reminiscent of crucifixion although that may not have been intentional) ensuring that hundreds of people present listened to the dying sound in rapt silence. Then Glennie slowly damped the bells one by one and eventually we were allowed to applaud – and some.

The concert had launched the  Scotland theme (both Macmillan and Glennie are Scottish) with Peter Maxwell  Davies’s warmly descriptive An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise (1985), The bagpipe solo (Robert Jordan) was as hauntingly evocative as anything in the programme.

Then, after the interval came Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888) for which the players moved to their usual position near the front of the stage. Paterson drew a colourful sound from the orchestra from the first bar and Ruth Rogers, BPO leader, played the solos, which represent the voice of the threatened story teller in the legend, with plaintive passion. Among the many noteworthy features in this performance were beautiful bassoon playing (Jonathan Price) in the second movement, melodic grandiloquence and some very pretty pizzicato work in the third movement and some fine brass playing, with the piccolo, in the joyous penultimate statement. It sent this reviewer away singing for several hours afterwards.

This concert was both mighty and moving.

Maidstone Symphony Orchestra

Mote, Hall Maidstone

Conductor: Brian Wright

Violinist: Mayumi Kangawa

 

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s tried and tested overture to The Wasps made a cheerful opener in this high-octane concert. The muted string “buzzing” at the beginning was admirably incisive and Brian Wright ensured that we heard plenty of melody especially from horn and flute.

Much less familiar, and arguably more challenging for the audience, was William Walton’s technically demanding 1939 violin concerto which, I have to confess, has never been a work I warm to. It was, however, charismatically played here by diminutive, smiling and immensely talented Mayumi Kangawa who gets a fabulous tone from the “Wilhelmj” Stadivarius instrument which she has on loan from Nippon Music Foundation. It shines like a well polished conker and has a voice like a timeless, show-stopping diva.

I liked the brisk crispness Kangawa brought to the second movement and her sumptuous double stopping in the vivace. She has an engaging way of leaning, lovingly into the high notes. And her bowing is elegantly sinuous.

For her encore she played an arrangement by Jascha Heifitz (for whom the preceding concerto was written) of the spiritual Deep River – very legato, soulfully beautiful and a complete contrast.

I never hear Berlioz’s programmatic Symphonie Fantastique (1830) without reflecting incredulously that it came just six years after Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and two years after Schubert’s death. The adjective “ground breaking” is an absurdly belittling understatement. It is, moreover, full of challenges which Wright and MSO rose to with aplomb. For example we got tender attention to dynamics along with some fine trumpet and timp work in the opening movement  and the harp in the second movement ball “scene” was delightful. Wright played up the drama and all that eerie mystery in the third movement with some beautiful playing from the four bassoons. The timp pasage (two sets) is always, as here, an arresting development. Then, after a deliciously menacing account of March to the Scaffold, MSO really went to town with the exciting piccolo screaming over lower wind in the finale and the drama of the tubular bells.

This concert felt like a musical roller-coaster. The Berlioz is gruelling to play (and conduct) but once again, they pulled it off in spades. Congratulations to them all.

 

Writers and Directors: Tabitha Kenworthy and Nadia Heap

Drayton Arms Theatre

Genevieve, who is 15, sees herself as a writer. Her forte is fan fiction, and she is hiding in a school changing room because she has lost her all-revealing notebook. So, from that vantage point, she tells us about her concerns – especially the four girls who don’t understand her and the boy, Jack, she fancies.

 

 

Tabitha Kenworthy, who is a convincing, naturalistic actor, presents three of these herself, so it feels like a one-person play – except that, 35 minutes in, Nadia Heap appears as Lara, who briefly takes Genevieve to task for self-absorption. This structure makes the play seem uneven.

There seems to be a fashion for plays with a menstruation theme at present, such as Nilgün Yusuf’s much better play Nine Moons, which played at the Old Red Lion and the Lion and Unicorn earlier this month. Genevieve has yet to menstruate and is desperate to reach this adolescent right of passage, so it’s an obsession which she returns to frequently, leading to a mildly amusing but predictable ending.

There is a lot of wry humour in this play because it’s well-observed. Any teenage girl who noted down her sex fantasies and inner thoughts and then lost them would be stressing like mad. And the writing is very apt. It isn’t, however, the comic romp which the young, support-your-mates, laugh-at-every-line audience wanted it to be.

There is also an issue with length. Changing Rooms is billed at 60 minutes. In fact, it runs barely 40 minutes and feels very slight.

Reviewed on 25 November 2024

The Reviews Hub Score  3.5 stars

Slightly amusing

This review was first published by The Reviews Hub: https://www.thereviewshub.com/changing-rooms-drayton-arms-theatre-london/

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Cadogan Hall

28 November 2024

Conductor: Alexander Shelley

Piano: Janos Balazs

 

After a breathtaking sprint through Smetana’s Bartered Bride overture featuring some lovely work from second violins, it was time for the centre piece of this concert which provided the overall title: Tribute to a Hungarian Legend.

I am not usually a fan of being talked at during concerts. I prefer to let the music do the speaking. I have to admit, however, that Alexander Shelley does it very well and given the newness of the next piece, it probably benefited from a verbal introduction. Moreover, getting a piano into position with a large orchestra on Cadogan Hall’s relatively small stage is a fiddly operation so it made sense to provide the audience with something else to focus on:  Shelley talking, as he also did at the beginning of the concert and after the interval.

The work features, directly and indirectly, three Hungarians so, unsurprisingly, there were many Hungarian people in the audience for this interesting UK premiere. Gyorgy Cziffra (1921-1994) was a renowned pianist, composer, conductor and teacher whose difficult life included imprisonment by both the Nazis and Stalin. Peter Eotovos (who died earlier this year) composed this four movement piano concerto, Cziffra Psodia, as a tribute to Cziffra and dedicated it to Janos Balazs who was at Cadogan Hall to play it.

                                                                       Gyorgy Cziffra

It’s an immensely complex work, quite hard to take in at a single hearing. No wonder Balazs needed the music up and was evidently reading it, while there were many brows furrowed with concentration in the orchestra.  Overtly intended to be programme music it “describes” some of the ups and downs of Cziffra’s life and includes dissonance, tranquillity and many unsettling passages. Balazs played it with loving care and phenomenal technique, listening carefully to the leader’s solo passages, which often use quarter tones and interrogative glissandi. Almost the best thing, though, was the cimbalom (Anna Bradley), effectively a second solo line,  representing Cziffra’s father who played it with his son. It has a glorious twangy, haunting sound which fits the piece perfectly.

Balazs played a Lizst Hungarian Rhapsody as his encore, telling the audience that it provided some of the ideas for the concerto we’d just heard. It was a well-warmed-up, bravura performance. His fingers moved so fast in the final variation that they blurred.

The concert was completed, after the interval, with a performance of Brahms’s second symphony, as familiar as the concerto had been otherwise. Shelley, however, now conducting without a score, highlighted the delicate darkness in the opening Allegro non troppo with tender, plaintive work from lower strings and warm horn solos. I also liked the balance in the second movement with nicely played wind parts. Shelley digs out and runs with every melody –  and this is Brahms so there are plenty of those – but he never wallows.

The sunny uplands of the allegretto featured some impressively percussive string work followed by contrasting elegant lyricism and I was astonished by the speed of the final movement which was “con spirito” in every sense. If you can do it at that speed the music dances off the page. Shelley also ensured we also heard the nifty timp work and gave us spectacularly rousing last few lines.

 

Beauty and the Beast

Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury

Written and directed by Paul Hendy

Evolution Pantomimes

 Star rating: 4

Over its 20 years of partnership with Evolution Pantomimes the Marlowe Theatre has developed a panto brand all of its own. I have seen almost all of them and it just goes on getting better – in terms of casting, production values, energy and an indefinable element which makes every single audience member feel part of the action – like an annual family party.

Since taking over as Dame from the late great Dave Lee (who always gets an honourable mention and has a statue outside the theatre) sixteen years years ago, Ben Roddy has built a very personal persona. And he’s in fine form in this Beauty and the Beast – simpering, pouting, grinning looking hurt and gleeful and timing the jokes with effortless near-military precision. His outfits (designed by Michael J Batchelor) are joyfully entertaining too.

Phil Gallagher is another Marlowe regular and he and Roddy work well together enjoying the joke about the former being three years older than the latter but regularly being cast as her son. Their trolley-of-themed-puns routine which has become a Marlowe Pantomime fixture is, as ever, slickly funny

Maisie Smith, as Belle, is a lot more than an ex-soap opera/Strictly Come Dancing celebrity glad of a job over Christmas. The Marlowe Pantomime does not do that. Rather, she is a talented stage performer with real personality, kindly and assertively determined to tame the beast aka Prince Henri (Joseph Hewlett – lots of gravitas) because, as she keeps saying in a very 21st century way, looks don’t matter. It’s personality which counts. Smith sings well and, of course, she’s good in the dance routines.

Among the strong cast of support actors (including a fine ensemble of eight) Richard David-Caine impresses as Danton with his lithe, aggressively sexy body, risque looks at the audience, skilled voice work (that cod French accent!), stage presence and energy.

The music. which jokily references many genres, is splendid too with veteran MD, Chris Wong in charge. Wong has been at the musical helm of the Marlowe Pantomime for thirty years having originally worked with the company with preceded Evolution. He and one other band member work from a box above stage right with two more above stage left. And the sound pounds seamlessly on, whether it’s Ghostbusters for the ghost scene for which they brought Wong on stage and pointed out that he must have played the chorus sixteen thousand times, or a lyrical duet between Smith and Hewlett.

Having said all that Beauty and the Beast is not an ideal story for pantomime treatment because its themes are, at heart, serious. This means that in this production you get a faintly uneasy mix of comic scenes with wonderful costumes, lighting and special effects interspersed with interludes which become pure musical theatre. It, therefore, feels at times slightly bitty but that’s a minor gripe about a show which really does tick the boxes for the people of Kent and beyond.

Incidentally I haven’t seen the backstage crew brought onstage and acknowledged at the curtain call since His Dark Materials at National Theatre. The cast thanked the front of house staff at the end too. All very civilised and such a good example to the many children in the audience.

Napoleon, Un Petit Pantomime

By John Savournin and David Eaton

Directed by John Savournin and Benji Sperring

Jermyn Street Theatre/Charles Court Opera

Star rating: 5

You can always rely on Charles Court Opera for musical excellence and lots of wit. And as last year, their pantomime sits happily and hilariously in Jermyn Street’s bijoux space with an accomplished cast of five and enough energy to launch a rocket.

All the traditional pantomime elements are in (Oh yes they are!) including a repetitive rhyme for the audience to respond to, rhyming couplets and a scene in which two audience members compete. We also get a quest, disguises and Brexit jokes. It’s a long way from your run-of-the-mill Cinderellas and Aladdins, however, and feels sparkily fresh.  The puns are delicious, for example and include plays on Bonaparte (blown-apart, bone-apart and the rest) and a clever series of George Orwell jokes. And who could resist a pair of cows called Souffle and Sue Gray?

It’s the music, however, which makes this show special. Accompanied by David Eaton, MD and composer, on piano stage right and some fine guitar playing from stage left, the show works ingeniously through a whole range of musical styles.  Amy J Payne as feisty, feminist Georgina (the future George IV – sort of)  sings Cherubino’s aria from The Marriage of Figaro with very funny new words. There’s a beautifully harmonised and sung anthem-like quintet based on the EastEnders signature tune, a reference to Elton John, a reworking of Petula Clark’s Down Town as Beef Pie and lots of pop parodies. And the point is that these are real singers so it all sounds terrific.

Matthew Kellett as Napoleon the villain (lots of traditional cackling laughter), has great fun hamming it up and then singing in his glorious baritone voice. He’s assisted in his anti-British villany by the ghost of Marie Antoinette (Rosie Stobel – good) who clambers out of her picture frame to do her bit.  Elliot Broadfoot is a larger-than-life nightshirted George III richocheting between clumsy madness and incongruously nimble dancing. And Jennie Jacobs is mannishly ridiculous and highly entertaining as the stage-commanding Duke of Wellington

All in all this is an outstanding show which ably demonstrates that excellence is nothing to do with size or scale. It was even educational. Who knew that Napoleon was responsible (offered a prize for development of non-dairy spread, apparently) for the invention of margarine? I certainly didn’t and had to Google it to check the way home.

I’m not sure who recommended this book to me. I found it lurking on my Kindle, in my digital TBR list. But someone must have done, or maybe I read a review when it was published earlier this year, because I evidently bought it. Reading it now was an unexpected, stumbled-upon treat and one of my occasional flights into non-fiction.

Laing, clearly a knowledgeable gardener, and her husband Ian, bought a house in Suffolk not long before the Pandemic. The overarching narrative in this book is her autobiographical account of how she rediscovered, worked hard at, and revived the garden originally created by landscape garden, Mark Rumary, who once lived there with his partner. She has one third of an acre divided into a series of “rooms”. Her descriptions are beautifully sensuous – you can see the colours, smell the soil and feel the rhizomes of the honey fungus which she digs up and dumps. Jackdaws live noisily in the garden along with different sorts of bees and you can almost smell the dizzying pollen as the garden re-emerges and develops.  In part, it’s a book for gardeners but you don’t need to be technical about it (I’m not) to get drawn in.

The best thing about The Garden Against Time, however, is her informed eclectic, reflections on what gardens mean, stand for and symbolise now and in the past. Gardens are closely linked culturally and etymologically with paradise and she’s so good on Milton, especially Paradise Lost that she has inspired me to reread it. Interesting isn’t it how reading is a lifelong, unending treasure hunt with every book pointing gently to another one?

She writes evocatively about gardens she visits, and is inspired by, all over the UK and elsewhere: Great Dixter, Belsay, the great gardens of Suffolk and many more. And she meets and talks to people who knew Mark Rumary. At the same time there are Pandemic restrictions which confine her to her garden and trigger more thoughts about the functions of gardens in the past, present and future – pointing out that huge tranches of the population became first time gardeners in 2020 and 2021 because as Voltaire wrote in Candide, when all else fails, “Il faut cultiver le jardin”.

Laing has a passionate political agenda which sometimes becomes a bit wearing. Yes, I know slavery was an appalling concept by 2024 standards, but it happened and we can’t undo it. We do well to remember, moreover, that every single one of us is the beneficiary of slavery because it created British wealth across the board. It’s far too simplistic to single out individual, “wicked”  plantation owners (such as the fictional Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park) with their country piles, parks and gardens. If you don’t know about the work of landscapers Capability Brown and Humphry Repton, you will once you’ve read this book although Laing is scathing about how they “reworked” huge acreages which often meant displacing whole villages and communities.

And, occasionally, her historical interpretations exasperated me. Charles II did not “seize” the throne in 1660. He was restored very carefully, partly because there was no republican successor. His powers were strictly limited compared with those of his father who’d been executed in 1649. I was fascinated though, by her account of the famous Enclosure Acts which we all learned about (sort of) at school. She deems them a “land grab” and maybe that’s accurate. Suddenly the ordinary people who lived, on and by the land, no longer had a place to grow their own produce. Should all land, in fact, be “common”, Laing wonders as she debates communism and socialism and ways in which they’ve been practised or abused down the generations?  Laing, of course, owns her own Suffolk garden although she is delighted to fulfil her aim of opening it to the public through the National Gardens Scheme.

It’s not an easy book to categorise. Garden Against Time , subtitled “In search if a common paradise”, is variously an autobiography (death of her stepmother, her father’s illness and inheritance problems are another concurrent thread), a gardening book, literary criticism, history of land ownership, political treatise and a lot more. That is probably why it’s such a compelling, sometimes provocative, read. It’s also rather beautiful.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde